Captioning: It’s Time for a Revolt

What if every person who was deaf, Deaf, had hearing loss (plus those peoples’ friends and family) refused to do business with a company that didn’t caption its videos?

Cartoon rendition of dozens of various people of different genders, ethnicities, and ages protesting in the street

I saw an article recently, which identified strategies that business people who don’t want to caption videos should use to try and avoid it. Basically, it advocated strategies for business people to deliberately choose which allows them to discriminate against people with hearing loss if they don’t feel like paying for captioning. I’m not going to link to it or mention the author’s name because he doesn’t deserve the attention. But this article made me mad. Really really mad. Full-on “Mama bear, go off the deep-end” mad. Because my daughter is deaf, and when you don’t caption, you are hurting my child.

The author is arguing that business people can make an “undue burden” analysis for captions. Additional he suggests that they pretend they are broadcasters to take advantage of an exemption under the FCC laws if their business has less than $3 million in revenue. He claims that “add[ing] captions to a prerecorded webinar is relatively easy and inexpensive, but that live captioning was both technically difficult and expensive.”

Here is why his arguments are a specious pile of donkey dung.

• Closed captioning costs range from $1 to $4 per minute